South Africa elections: share your stories

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On 7 May, South Africa will go to the polls in the first election since Nelson Mandela’s death and the first year that the so-called "born free" generation – born after apartheid ended in 1994 – are eligible to vote.We want to hear about your South Africa. What are your hopes and aspirations for the upcoming elections? Share your images, video and text with GuardianWitness

I was one of millions who fought for the inevitable freedom from the hatred and poverty of Apartheid's regime. We stood alongside them from start to finish and the Beloved President Mandela built the Truth & Reconciliation Commission. As a freedom writer for Amnesty International (AI), we wrote countless Prisoners of Conscience including Pres. Mandela, who I wrote for years and while President (we who fought knew this would happen). We did many campaigns, including the key campaign that led to Botha's doorstep, demanding release of all prisoners of conscience fighting the Apartheid Regime. Then Little Steven's SUN CITY Album using top hero bands who refused to ever perform in Sun City till apartheid ended, lit that flame like a match to gas-- and woke the sleeping world with the sudden facts, and truth, the murders, beatings, silencing of a people that had had enough. The words ring to this day "YOU CAN SHOOT ME , I SACRIFICE MYSELF" of those hearts willing to die for their human rights and civil rights met. Little Steven and Danny Schecter did everything in their power to highlight crimes that the watching world would no longer tolerate and allow. We all knew that the inevitable tide would come to pass, that led South Africans to live the lives they were born for, dignity, liberty, freedom and equality. We will never forget our heroes, whose courage led ours, and worldwide, we were united in strength, we would not give up til Apartheid was CRUSHED. And CRUSHED it was. We will never forget you, our heroes and those innocent who were murdered by the Police for a non violent march.... a day of infamy, the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, we will never forget those who suffered the indignities as the people of South Africa, to suffer the poverty of such ignorance as led the leaders of the apartheid gov't. We will never forget you BIKO, WIWA, MASELKA BROTHERS, MANDELA (AMANDLA!), THE FOUNDERS OF THE ANC , THE MOTHERS WHO RAISED THE NATION OF SOUTH AFRICA TO BE ALL THAT IT COULD BE AND TO DEFY TYRANTS AND IMPOVERISHED HEARTS. WE WILL NOT FORGET THOSE JOURNALISTS WHO DIED TO BRING THE TRUTH TO THE WORLD. We are with you still.

86-year old Christinah Moeti, says she's voting out of gratefulness. "Today I receive a pension; have a home and so do my children and grandchildren because of the ANC. They will have my vote till I die", she went on to say. Photo: Koketso Moeti

After years of campaigning with the anti-apartheid movement in London I went to South Africa for the first time inn 1994 to cover the momentous events surrounding the first free multi-racial, multi-party elections, and even met the wondrous Nelson Mandela. This show in London tells the story of my truly unforgettable time there.

Thinking about the queues at South African elections makes me homesick. You see, I live in the UK now, where election day is a pretty dull affair. An empty grey school hall where election officials outnumber voters. Just two minutes of your time and you have completed your democratic duties.

I am a white South African and the first time I cast my vote was in the 1994 elections. Our polling station was in a shopping mall, across the road from a large park. The queue snaked out of the shopping mall, along the road and around the park. We queued for hours, said hello to neighbours and friends, listened to the singing. Looking at the queue, our previously white neighbourhood had colour.

The last time I cast my vote, I took my baby son along with me, strapped to my chest in a sling. Again, we stood for hours, chatting to our friends from the neighbourhood, cracking jokes and passing the baby around.

Born Free it's a phrase I've been hearing a lot of in the last few weeks in the run up to the twenty years of Freedom celebrations and of course the the sixth democratic election that South Africa will experience. The term Born Free refers to the generation born post-apartheid, a generation for the most part still under twenty fresh faced dewy eyed and looking brightly out on the world. When I think on their faces I understand better how impossibly young this country is and how much further it has to go to reach full maturity.

The flip side of the term Born Free is that I instantly go to the soundtrack the 1966 Film Born Free an Africa story of totally different kind all about a domesticated lioness and British couple's African adventure. The two lead characters are more concerned about the freedom of a big cat than that of there fellow man. Admittedly this story is not a South African one but a Kenyan one. Mainly however that is how we westerners view Africa a large safari park with it's heart cut out demarcated a no go area and genocide zone.

It's hard for us to fathom the complexity of South Africa, never mind Africa as whole. Standing around in a Pretorian supermarket it would be difficult for most westerns to conceive, that at any given time you could be surrounded by more than six languages, making it almost impossible to get any true understanding of what is going on. You get a sense of happy talk, sad talk, that's it, nothing more. Most people speak English to varying levels and actually it has to be said for the most part in my experience it is the police that seem to have the worst English language skills. Only on Sunday while out celebrating Freedom Day we were left with a policeman grunting at us one word “Plastic Plastic” repeatedly. What did it mean? He pointed at our six pack of beers we were carrying to our car and simply repeats the same words again “Plastic, Plastic.” Eventually we figured out that the alcohol should have been covered, though by this time we had reached our car and it didn't matter. However here in Pretoria you are more likely to be greeted in Afrikaans than any other language and despite being a city brimming with diplomats, foreign officials and international NGO's, a foreign accent still raises plenty of eyebrows.

The international press and journalists too easily flit between the terms black and white and within the South African press the term coloured crops up too. Coloured here is legitimate and respected term to refer to people of mixed race who originate from the cape colonies. To put it bluntly all these terms are far to simplistic. There are English whites, Afrikaans whites and immigrant whites that often don't mix. Many English people won't speak Afrikaans some often stating they consider it to be inferior. Though most Afrikaans speakers are fully bilingual with a preference for Afrikaans, that shines through at any given opportunity. While first generation immigrant whites who are often of Portuguese, Greek or Eastern European origins tend to speak three languages. Meanwhile within the black population (At least in Gauteng) it's quite common to discover that someone can speak up to five languages, and still affiliate with a specific tribe, though openly ethnically mixed. There are eleven official languages and here, in the cites, other slang languages that use elements of those eleven languages combine to greater or lesser degrees. Even after a year it's been hard to find the cultural distinctions of african tribes. I meet people separately and then when I find two people in the same tribe I try to pair them together in my head. The most prominent stereotype I've come across is that of the Zulu taxi driver. Two African's are far more likely to initially greet each other in English until they find another shared common ground. It's part of what makes the education so difficult, that at home many South Africans can be surrounded by up to four languages before entering the school system where they then have to learn how to speak and write English as their fifth tongue. I can think of few places in the world where this could be possible but here in South Africa it is. So when you are watching these little cuties waving to you through the television screen with their school uniforms on just bear in mind they are going to grow up with much deeper understanding of an assortment of cultures than you and I could ever hope for. These African children are dazzlingly bright even without formal education.

However much larger problems loom than education. At the moment on the road in between Pretoria and Johannesburg there is currently a billboard that states 'A child is rape ever three minutes in South Africa.' bundle in with that the high incidence of infanticide and then you begin to get the picture of a highly traumatised country. This is without even addressing the high occurrence of adult rape, murder, violent crime and the endemic corruption that shackles the country. Yes there is freedom, the kind of freedom that leaves the wealthy and the poor barricaded in at night. Foreigners refer to after dark as 'Zombie Time', where it is considered against all your best interests to be left wondering the streets after the sun goes done. So instead those who can afford it navigate the streets, even the very shortest of distances in their mobile fortresses the car.

Other issues too pop up frequently. At the moment the South African government are hell bent on completing a number of coal power stations. If you've ever spent an afternoon under the African sun you'd be astonished given the unlimited power that is available to the South African people by way of solar power and yet it's not even a blip on the radar for most. They know solar energy exists and it is used by many homes to heat the hot water tank. However that is the extent of it. To most large scale role out of solar farms seems as incomprehensible as living on the moon. Now in the winter months all areas of South Africa sporadically undergo periods of load shedding. Load shedding is a system where the government systematically turn off the power to whole districts for periods up to but not restricted to six hours. This is to stop the system from overloading. Generally the first you know about it is when you get up to put the kettle on to discover that it's not working, a few sleepy moments later you try the lights and know the power is off. We do of course have sporadic unplanned power cuts too. Very few complain given that much of the South African population are living without any power whatsoever, even here in Pretoria there are communities that have never had power or even running water the resulting social unrest is referred to frequently as service delivery protests. In fact that is what much of what the Marikana miners' strike circled around; miners seeking sufficient pay and local services to lift them out of extreme poverty that would allow them to have access to running water, decent sewerage and electricity. Not much to ask for when the company you work for is earning billions and exporting it over seas on the back of your excruciating hard work. Being South African is no easy task, this is reflected in one of the lowest life expectancy rates in the world at a measly forty-nine years of age.

For the wealthy the big issue is E-tolling between Pretoria to Johannesburg, people are now expected to pay for one of the many improvements to the national infrastructure brought by the 2010 world cup and most of the money is again being pumped back out of the country to foreign investors, and yet nobody here would dare say 'neo-colonialism'. They go one about the government, Jacob Zuma and the ANC but they don't think about the larger powers that bankroll this continent and where the true power lies. The South African government refusal to let the Dali Lama into the country is subtle reflection of this. I would place a wager there are more courses on International Development and African Studies in London than there are in the whole of Africa and it is here we see where the greater problem arises.

For all these reasons it's easy to understand that people are dis-satisfied. Many of them more than this strangely angry with twenty years of freedom and of course the ANC. Parts of the populace are completely disillusioned, government seems to to be run like a giant jobs for the boys club and there are endless stories of woefully under qualified civil servants sitting in high paid jobs creaming off whatever they can for themselves, while wreaking havoc in hugely under resourced government system. Yet somehow we all know the money is there, mis-spent, misused and syphoned off into the pockets of those who are suppose to working for the country's betterment.

There is virtually no distinction between the government and the ANC you only have to go to one government organised or more importantly public holiday celebration to discover the whole thing is stewarded by ANC volunteers, with sprinklings of police and private security companies. It's a movement struggling to fit into the confines of a political party. There is a plethora of ANC promotional material on show so much so that I'm sure many of the T-shirts could be branded as vintage. People swath themselves in the colours of the ANC using anything they can from face paint to flags. Only the more discerning Africans in the audience seem to opt for the South African flag. At Sunday's freedom celebrations outside the union buildings there were a group of uncomfortable looking Economic Freedom Fighters (the EFF) standing in the crowd too wearing there own very well branded bright red merchandise and red berries. At first glance it makes me think it's more about the way they parties look rather than what either of the party delivers, that old thing called propaganda. It's also startling just how few white people are in the crowds, even when Nelson Mandela was lying in state there was poor show. Though of course the media skew it to look otherwise. Meanwhile just ten block away in the suburb or Sunnyside a small alternative space has cropped up as a venue for cultural exchange. A band plays and over an array of assorted percussion instruments tell stories of truth, stories that criticise Mandela, the government; with the resounding words “a liar and a thief”. They truly are angry but they are going beyond that to acknowledge the deep pain that is still rooted in South Africa and that there must be a much deeper healing for the country and across Africa in order to change the way we live. They feel short changed by the ANC, that Mandela opted for national stability rather than taking the opportunity to redress the very real inequality that now continues to exist here. They also feel that Mandela has set the tone for subsequent presidents to do little and gain much and touches on the Nkandla report. After twenty years of freedom many are calling for a boycott of sixth democratic election as a way of venting their frustration. The ANC may well be elected again. I seems change is on the horizon there is going to be a much greater split in the vote, a much truer representation of this fractured country.

Sadly the issues in our election are totally irrelevant. Too few care enough about good governance and understand the complexities of a modern economy.

Rather than race it is perhaps more pertinent that the core of the ANC support are state-dependent; either working for the grossly bloated civil service or welfare grant recipients. They don't see a place for themselves in a modern, skills-centric economy which paradoxically is the only way forward that can offer them a better future.

There is a real prospect of significant decline in the votes for the ANC in the better-informed larger conurbations such as Johannesburg which is encouraging.

But the ANC, like ZANU-PF, know there core strength is in the poorly-educated rural areas - and that is the tragedy that we face and will continue to mean that South Africa considerably under-performs.